It's an honor and a
privilege to pay homage to Wendy Carlos, and to celebrate
her appointment of the 2005
SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award.

It was my good fortune to
meet Wendy some four decades ago, when she was a student of
Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia Princeton Electronic
Music Center. Over the years as her areas of expertise
broadened and her place of honor at the forefront of
synthesis and electronic music production became widely
acknowledged, she always set the highest standards, - both
musical and technical, - through her keen esthetic sense and
meticulous attention to detail.

Wendy always seemed to be
the first to grasp the musical potential of new electronic
music gear and, at the same time, to accept responsibility
for developing the discipline necessary to use the new
instruments to produce music of the highest quality. The
unprecedented popularity of Switched-on Bach, which Wendy
released at a time of great ferment in our popular musical
culture, was at once strikingly innovative and of
breathtakingly high musical quality. I remember the occasion
on which Switched-on Bach was first played in public. It was
at a technical session of the Audio Engineering Society in
the fall of 1968, just a few weeks before the record went on
sale. The entire roomful of audio engineering professionals
gave Wendy an emotional and enthusiastic standing ovation.
And a short time after that, Switched-on Bach was on its way
to becoming one of the best-selling classical albums of all
time.

With each succeeding
release, Wendy continued to scale new heights of technical
sophistication, creativity, and musical excellence. As tape
has given way to hard disk recording and digital synthesis
has arrived on the music technology scene, Wendy has
continued to develop techniques, set standards, and produce
recorded music that is a joy and an inspiration to countless
thousands of listeners around the world.